


In Practice

by wafflelate



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: ANBU - Freeform, Gen, Identity Porn Without Porn, Secret Identities, Very Mild And Inaccurate Medical Details
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-05 14:09:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18830248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wafflelate/pseuds/wafflelate
Summary: “This is Bat,” Hawk says.Bat waves to Sakura. “Oh, good,” she says in a voice like she chews gravel, “you do make house calls.”Sakura is briefly thrown by the obvious voice modulation but recovers enough to respond — “Um, yes. But usually there’s more house. Can you... describe your symptoms?”Is this what Shikako’s missions feel like? Sakura doesn’t know how she handles it.





	In Practice

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Voldecourt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Voldecourt/gifts).



“So, taichō,” Bat says when they’ve sealed up the bodies and gotten a little distance from the site of their quick and _nearly_ painless battle. 

“I hate that tone of voice,” Hawk informs her. “It’s never anything good.” 

“It’s definitely not good,” Bat confirms. 

“Ugh,” Hawk says. Behind him, Towa and Komachi look at each other and then straighten their posture and tense, as if preparing for the worse. 

“Putting off telling you won’t really make it better.” Bat pauses. “Well, it might be kind of exciting, if it were a surprise, but not the fun kind of exciting.” 

Hawk stops reorganizing his kunai pouch and makes an impatient gesture at her. “Just tell me.” 

Sheepishly, Bat says, “Right. Well. I think I was poisoned. Probably fatally.” 

So embarrassing. 

Towa and Komachi still completely. 

Hawk bursts into sudden movement, arriving immediately into Bat’s personal bubble, close enough that she can see his eyes flick red as he uses the Sharingan to look her over. “You’re not injured,” he observes, but it’s not a denial — just a question. 

“I healed it before the poison hit.” Well, she’d moved into shadow state. Same difference. She gestures vaguely at her arm, just above the elbow, where even now in shadow state the top of her glove has a fairly dramatic rip, although the skin beneath is whole and unscarred. 

He reaches out and tries to touch her arm, but he can’t — his fingers just brush through her insubstantial form. 

“I’m using a technique to hold back the effects of the poison, but I can’t hold it forever,” Bat adds. She and Hawk have never discussed the specific limitations of shadow state, or even actually talked about what it is, but all techniques are limited by their users and Hawk’s not an idiot. He’ll know that traveling all the way back to Konoha while holding shadow state won’t work. They’re too far away. And besides which, the mission isn’t yet over. 

“We could break protocol,” Hawk says, easily. 

Towa sucks in a sharp breath. 

Komachi says, “ _Taichō—_ ” but cuts herself off. Presumably she knows no protest she could raise would actually sway Hawk. 

“That’s an option, but let’s try bending them first,” Bat suggests. “I don’t want Tsunade-sama to throw her desk at you. When we entered the country, I sensed something that might help.” 

* * *

Something scuffles in the dark, and Sakura frowns very sternly at that particular patch of darkness, trying to psychically warn away the curious racoon or whatever it is creeping around out there. _Nothing_ could be as bad as the bear from their first C-rank, but Sakura would prefer to go an entire mission without having to punch any woodland creatures for getting a little too frisky. And not just because Anko-sensei will make fun of her when she hears about it. 

Sadly, the scuffling does not go away. Instead a shinobi emerges from that particular patch of darkness, a broad-shouldered guy with hawk mask, wearing bone-white armor. Sakura tenses — wishes Anko-sensei were here, prepares to fight, and plans to wake up Isaribi and Yakumo all at the same time — but he gives the Konoha standard signs requesting discretion, secrecy, and medical aide. 

Sakura would feel better if she had her team awake and at her back but... the signs are correct, and formed urgently, the way Anko-sensei gestures when she’s signing an order. Tsunade-sama has told her over and over again how important medics are to the village. How valuable it makes her. 

If this is a comrade who needs help, she has to do it. But she also has to be sure. So she challenges him with the highest level identification code she knows: “Limit of the thousands hands, respectful hands, unable to touch the darkness. Shooting hands unable to reflect the blue sky.” 

The hawk-masked ninja tilts his head. “The road that basks in light,” he says, “the wind that ignited the embers, time that gathers when both are together.” 

So: he’s a Konoha ninja, he outranks her, he’s leading a mission, someone _else_ on the mission is injured, and he’s not doing any of this under duress. 

Sakura feels a brief moment of relief that he’s not an enemy followed by a wave of self-doubt. She has a medical kit and she has good training but she’s nowhere near done learning everything she needs to know and she didn’t think she’d be triaging any _strangers_ in the _middle of the night_. 

“I’m Hawk,” he says. “I need you to follow me — it’s imperative that as few people as possible know we were ever here.” 

Sakura glances back at the still-sleeping forms of Isaribi and Yakumo. “But—” she starts. 

“They’ll be safe,” Hawk promises. “They won’t be alone.” 

There’s no one else around, as far as Sakura can tell, but she gets the feeling she wouldn’t have known that Hawk was around if he hadn’t purposefully made a noise, so she grabs her pack — it has her medical supplies — and follows him. He leaps through the trees ahead of her like a ghost, never so much as shaking a leaf as he goes. She admires his form even as it makes her feel like a clumsy genin all over again, entirely too aware of how new her chūnin vest is and how few missions she’s actually been on. 

He brings her to a clearing well-lit by moonlight where a woman wearing a bat mask seems to be loitering aimlessly. She has the same shoulder tattoo that Hawk has, a tattoo that only strikes Sakura as strange now that she’s seen the exact same one on two separate animal-masked people, but that’s probably the kind of thing that’s definitely none of her business. Or at least not yet. 

Like Anko-sensei always says, anything can be your business if you stick your nose in it hard enough. You just have to be aware you might lose your nose, and decide if it’s worth it, and think about if you’d maybe be better served just getting powerful enough to make whatever it is your business the conventional way. 

“This is Bat,” Hawk says. 

Bat waves to Sakura. “Oh, good,” she says in a voice like she chews gravel, “you do make house calls.” 

Sakura is briefly thrown by the obvious voice modulation but recovers enough to respond — “Um, yes. But usually there’s more house. Can you... describe your symptoms?” 

Is this what Shikako’s missions feel like? Sakura doesn’t know how she handles it. 

“No,” Bat says. “Sorry.” 

That’s going to be a problem. Sakura crosses her arms across her chest. “Security clearance regulations authorize me to learn anything I need to know to save a patient’s life.” 

Bat’s shoulder’s shake. “No, it’s not classified,” she says. It’s hard to tell with the voice modulation, but Sakura thinks she’s laughing. “It’s just, I’m using a jutsu to keep the poison from... doing anything. And I started it as soon as I began feeling poisoned. So... no symptoms yet, but I can release the jutsu and start having them whenever you’re ready.” 

Sakura had previously been comforting herself by thinking, well, if this kunoichi made it all the way here under her own power, clearly it’s a slow-acting poison. She thought she’d have time to work it out — but apparently not. 

“Alright, show me the wound,” Sakura says. “And how long between when you got it and when you felt the first effects? And what does ‘feeling poisoned’ mean — dizzy? Nauseous?” There’s a whole kilometre-long poison checklist to run down, and Sakura has it memorized for just this occasion. 

“I healed the wound pretty much immediately.” Bat lifts her hand to her left arm, sticks two fingers in a ragged tear in the upper part of her long gloves, and shows Sakura several inches of completely unblemished skin there. “It wasn’t very big. I started feel off-balance after about 3 minutes of sustained physical exertion in combat.” 

“Is _that_ why you tripped?” Hawk asks under his breath. “I thought you were just feeling clumsy.” He’s hanging back, leaning against a tree, looking like he could wait there for days for Sakura to figure this out. 

Bat turns her head to aim her fierce mask at him. “Shut up, taichō.” 

Hawk tsks. “Insubordination. That’s going on your record.” 

The continue trading barbs like an old married couple. Sakura kind of just wants to watch it happen, but she has a job to do, so she sets her bag down and unpacks her medical kit — which is a small bag that holds a few essentials and one medium-sized storage seal. 

“Oh,” Bat says when Sakura pulls the storage seal out, breaking away from her squabble with Hawk. “A NaraTen seal. Aren’t those still pricey?” 

“ _Bat_ ,” Hawk sighs. 

“I’m just curious!” 

“Um, are they?” Sakura asks, frowning down at it. “It was a gift for my promotion — I’m in the Kunoichi Club with Tenten. She just drew it out for me.” 

The seal poofs open with just a little chakra smoke, revealing a low table stocked with sealed medical supplies and a tightly-rolled bedroll. Sakura sets out the bedroll first and gestures for Bat to lay down on it. Then she beckons Hawk over and hands him one of Shikako’s light seals. 

“Just push chakra into it and it’ll make light,” Sakura explains. “Sorry to turn you into a lamp, but it’s better if I can see what I’m doing.” 

Hawk nods and soon there’s ring of light around Bat and Sakura and the table of supplies. Perfect. 

“Right,” Sakura says, turning back to Bat and bringing chakra for a diagnostic scan into her hands. “You can stop and start the jutsu you’re using to keep the poison from progressing, right?” 

“Unless I’m incapacitated.” 

“We’ll do a minute without it and see what the diagnostic picks up. You focus on how it feels. I’ll pick up everything I can with the diagnostic.” Sakura looks up at Hawk, squinting past the light he’s holding. “Will you keep time?” 

“Yes,” Hawk says. He maybe, _maybe_ sounds relieved to have something useful to do, although it’s hard to tell with the mask. 

Sakura takes a steadying breath and reaches out until her diagnostic jutsu is definitely touching Bat. There’s nothing there — just a little wisp of power, maybe, but nothing like a _body_ , which means no baseline, although Sakura knows better than to ask what kind of jutsu it is that Bat’s using. If they’d wanted her to know, they would have said. 

Sakura says, “Now,” and suddenly there’s a flesh-and-blood person for her diagnostic jutsu to latch on to. She’s rested her hand on Bat’s arm, just where the cut was, and is surprised to find that the skin there doesn’t even feel newly regrown like it should for something freshly healed. But there’s no reason to think Bat was lying and no way of knowing exactly what her technique is — possibly some kind of bloodline Sakura just hasn’t heard of — so that’s a mystery to ignore for now. 

Instead she focuses on Bat’s vitals and the health of her arm and the way her blood rushes around the body. Even a minute of combat for a kunoichi of any substance would be enough for the poison to circulate, so it’s much too late to draw the poison out before it has a chance to do anything. Instead, Sakura has to watch and wait for it to have some effect. Only then will she be able to identify it and draw it out. 

“Time,” Hawk says, which feels both much too soon and not soon enough. 

Bat’s body returns to being some kind of insubstantial illusion. Sakura kills her diagnostic and jots down a long list of notes — everything she noticed that could mean anything — and then looks to Bat. “How did it feel?” Sakura asks her, pen poised to write down symptoms. There are a lot of things that Bat might notice about her own body that Sakura couldn’t possibly hope to notice. 

“Bad,” her patient says. “I think I’ve lost some peripheral vision.” 

“I didn’t notice anything attacking your nerves, so it’s probably causing blockages.” Interesting that it focuses on the eyes first — it’s certainly the kind of effect one would want poison to have on one’s enemies in combat, but not exactly easy to fine-tune. Bat was fighting someone either very good at poisons or extremely well-supplied. 

“Oh, good,” Bat says. “I need my nerves. All of them.” 

“It’s not necessarily... good,” Sakura hedges. “It’ll probably cause blockages in your brain next, as it progresses, and strokes are... significantly harder to treat. But retinal artery and vein occlusion is a rare complication. Assuming it’s not something new... there’s less than a half-dozen dozen known poisons this could be.” Tsunade-sama has said again and again that it’s important to keep your highly trained patients very, very informed. 

“Let’s not let it get to the brain, then,” Hawk suggests. 

Bat nods up at him. “Good plan. I love it. This is why you’re captain; you have all the good ideas.” 

“Write that down in my next performance review, maybe I’ll get a raise.” 

“Do — do you actually have performance reviews?” Sakura butts in. 

Bat turns to look at her and Sakura gets the sense that Hawk does, too, at exactly the same time. She flushes, embarrassed, because _of course_ they don’t have performance reviews. Even _Sakura_ doesn’t have performance reviews. That’s a civilian thing, the kind of thing her parents complain about over dinner. Ugh. 

“Anyway,” Sakura says, desperate to move on and also to keep her mysterious patient from succumbing to enemy poison. “Let’s go again. Thirty seconds this time. I’ll focus on the eyes.” She brings the diagnostic back to her hands, and brings her hands to the sides of Bat’s face, on either side of the mask. 

She tells Hawk to start the timer again and Bat’s body reappears for a full thirty seconds underneath Sakura’s hands, long enough for Sakura to feel the occlusions, tiny build-ups in the arteries and veins of Bat’s eyes. Then Hawk calls time and Bat’s body is gone again, leaving Sakura to take down just a small handful of additional notes on the pad. 

“Again,” Sakura says when she’s done with her notes, and settles in for a long, long night. 

Sakura’s not sure yet if this will be enough, if she can really do this in the middle of nowhere without help, but she’s the best shot Bat has of not dying of a massive stroke on her way back to the village. She has to give it her best and hope she can at least do enough to let Bat get home to Tsunade-sama. 

* * *

Sakura shuffles into the regular Kunoichi Club meeting a little early, only dragging her feet a little from mission fatigue, and waves at Anko-sensei who’s in the back of the room explaining something to a delighted-looking Moegi. Anko breaks away from her informative, violent-looking gestures to wave back — and Moegi waves, too, which is adorable — but doesn’t stop talking. 

That’s fine. Sakura’s content to slump into her regular spot and wish she were still asleep. 

She’d gotten back to the village late in the evening and reported in to the mission desk that nothing strange had happened, just as Bat and Hawk had instructed her. Then she’d sent Isaribi and Yakumo home before crawling into her parents’ house through her bedroom window, stripping her mission gear, showering, and... emerging from the bathroom already in her pajamas to find a duck-masked arm-tattooed figure lurking in the hallway. 

“The Hokage needs to see you,” Duck had said, and whisked her away to see Tsunade-sama. Sakura had then spent half the night pouring over medical information about what she’d done for Bat, and how, and performing the blood filtration technique she’d used to fix Bat up on several animals. 

Staying in bed this morning would have been great. But she’d promised Anko-sensei that she’d attend this meeting if she was back in the village on time, and Sakura doesn’t want to let her sensei down. Besides, the table is plenty comfortable. Mostly. 

Someone sits down at the table across from Sakura and asks, “Do you want a pillow?” with no small amount of amusement. 

Sakura looks up. Incredibly, it’s _Shikako_. Looking better rested than Sakura and amused about it. 

“Yes,” Sakura says, hoping that that’s a genuine offer. 

Shikako, who’s absolutely the best friend a person could ask for, immediately produces a pillow and hands it over. She also says, “I have blankets, too.” 

“That’s probably a step too far,” Sakura says. They are in public after all. She presses the pillow to her chest for a minute, hugging it for strength, and then puts it down on the table so she can resume her previous position, only this time she turns her head to the side, in case Shikako wants to talk and expects a response. 

Shikako slides down the bench on the other side of the table until she’s sitting far enough down the table that Sakura can see her. “Rough mission?” she asks. 

“Yep,” Sakura says, before she remembers that, actually, Yakumo and Isaribi wouldn’t agree, because for them it had been an incredibly simple C-rank. Oops. Better think fast. “Well, no. Kind of. It was... my first time being in charge. No safety net.” 

“Oh, yeah, that’s tough,” Shikako says, just as Sakura remembers that Shikamaru had _lost an arm_ on the first mission Shikako had lead. Before she can apologize, though, Shikako adds: “I’m sure you did great, though, even if it wiped you out. Everyone got home safe, right?” 

“Yeah, they did.” 

Tsunade-sama had gone over all the relevant medical details for Bat from before and after the mission when she’d collected Sakura’s notes on the poison and treatment. Bat had remained stable throughout the rest of her mission and returned to the village well before Sakura and received a clean bill of health from Tsunade-sama herself.. It had been such a relief to hear that the treatment had been enough. That Bat wasn’t showing any vision loss or clotting. 

Sakura sighs and drags herself up off the table and takes the pillow with her, hugging it to her chest again. It’s her best friend right now, even though talking to Shikako is actually more appealing than a nap. “Hey, did I ever thank you?” 

Shikako blinks at her. “Probably? What for?” 

“Making me do something with my life,” Sakura says. “Suggesting I apply to the hospital, not just letting me stay useless—” 

“You were never useless,” Shikako interrupts. 

Her tone is more forceful than Sakura would expect. Almost a little angry. 

“Ah, I meant—” 

“I barely helped at all,” Shikako goes on, almost without pause, without even seeming to hear Sakura. “I forgot to even introduce you to my aunt. I just gave you information and you did the rest. Don’t sell yourself short, Sakura. You were always going to be amazing.” 

Sakura can feel a little heat rising to her face. She clutches the pillow to her chest a little tighter and wonders if Shikako has always felt this way, always believed in her. She opens her mouth to say... _something_ in reply, maybe to try and give Shikako back some of the credit, but Anko calls the meeting to order, so all she can do is mutter a quiet, “Thank you.” 

“No, thank _you_ ,” Shikako mutters back, even though that doesn’t make much sense at all. Sakura didn’t _do_ anything. 

She puzzles over the gratitude for the first half of the meeting, but eventually it slips away, just another unanswerable mystery. Sakura is just left to hold on to Shikako’s apparently long-standing, unshakeable belief in her, as if she’d known even right after graduation that Sakura would be waking up in the middle of the night to save random ANBU from impossibly rare poisons. 


End file.
